One of them is a fairly ordinary-looking person. He appears to be a human man, maybe middle aged, maybe older and well-preserved. He's in a button-down shirt and jeans that show no sign of wear. He has a blank spiral-bound notebook and two pens. His face is very blank; his posture is precisely slouchy enough to not be notably tense. He is going to stay allll the way over here on his side of the couch, as far as he can get from the other person.

The other person... also looks like a human man. His face is scarred. His wrists are scarred. Even his eyes are scarred and cloudy. Probably the rest of him is also scarred but the rest of him isn't particularly visible under his outfit, which is not made of any kind of textile and might be made entirely of shadows. He perches on top of the arm of the couch and curls up as tightly as he can while still balancing like that.

Why is this what Monday morning is like.

Ramona gulps her tea and tries to get herself under control. Being cranky and bitter at them is very unlikely to help.

She arranges her face in what she hopes is a neutrally pleasant expression.

"Hello and welcome. My name is Ramona. I understand you're here for relationship therapy? Could you please introduce yourselves?"

"It's very possible that we could. You may call me Traveler, if you like." His tone is very neutrally and distantly polite.

His face twitches in what does not end up being an entire grimace. "My name's Luka."

"Good morning. Or, at least, it's morning where I am. Thank you for coming in. Before we go over paperwork, can you say a little bit about why you're here and what you're hoping to accomplish?"

Maybe it will turn out that the stuff about murder and prison goes with some other case, and these two want to work out a new system for dividing up household chores.

The two of them say nothing for a few seconds and then Luka sighs. "Traveler here is struggling with unendorsed guilt and wants to talk to me the way you want to poke a bruise."

Visible emotional responses are for suckers.

"I see." Ramona doesn't actually see, yet, but maybe she'll get there. "Thank you. I'm sure that will make more sense as we go along."

She goes over the standard paperwork with them. A lot of clients have questions about confidentiality. Do Luka and Traveler have concerns about that?

Traveler shifts position slightly, maybe in a way that wasn't specifically a performance of casualness. Possibly. Probably. "It was represented to me by the Astral Therapy Agency that our participation here wouldn't have... strategic consequences, unless we both agreed to that, which means any gossip you might want to engage in will be with people irrelevant to our lives. Given that, I'm not particularly inclined to ask for anything beyond your professional obligations."

"And he's the person half my secrets are secret from," Luka says. He flashes Traveler a mirthless smile.

Fantastic. The confidentiality stuff has gotten a lot easier since she started letting the Agency book most of her caseload. It's one of the only things that's gotten easier.

"All right, then, let's get started!" The tea is starting to kick in and Ramona is going to Do This.

"Traveler, how are you feeling about being here, even though we didn't actually do anything yet?"

"This is a very welcoming environment and I consented to have this fragment of myself transported here." Luka is grinning and acting as though he's struggling not to laugh. Traveler looks over at him and sighs. "And I'm not especially hopeful that there will be lasting improvements to our relationship, let alone to anything I care about, but I'm not, myself, uncomfortable just being in the room."

(Luka is slightly less tense and grins through almost all of that, until the last clause, at which point he tenses back up and stops grinning and affects a disdainful air.)

"I'm glad you feel comfortable here, that's helpful." Not as helpful as having any motivation for change whatsoever! But sometimes that comes later.

"How about you, Luka? How are you feeling about being here?"

"I’ve spent a very long time speaking to only one other person and it gets very boring. So let’s say I’m just... interested in whatever happens."

"Traveler says he's not especially hopeful. What about you, Luka? How much hope do you have that change is possible?"

Luka laughs so hard he loses his balance and falls off the arm of the couch. He shakes his head, still laughing.

And Traveler looks pained, for the moment that his face is visible, and then he buries his head in his hands.

Ramona will wait patiently while Luka gets himself reorganized on the couch.

All right. Trying to force herself to be warm and welcoming feels bad, today, and it isn't working anyway. What if she goes straight to the heart of it?

"I'll take that as a no, you don't have hope for change, Luka."

"Therapy is all about change, that's the purpose of it. We talk about what's going on, we try to understand it, and then we try to change your relational system in some way so that it functions better for both of you."

"But if neither of you thinks that's possible, we can do something else instead."

She pauses for a long beat.

"I gather that it's comfortable here, and a change of pace. I could get out a deck of cards and we could play Spades."

She gazes levelly at them.

"It doesn't funge against any of my other projects and it wouldn't be worse than nonexistence - I was, I admit, hoping you would at least... help him avoid getting the way a mind gets when it eats itself for lack of connection, but this is probably a fine way of achieving that. I certainly respect anyone who manages to spend their work hours playing cards with such an ironclad excuse as wouldn't get them fired even if it came to light. If you're hoping to check whether we're disappointed in that proposal - I'm not surprised by it, and it achieves my more realistic goals, though I would certainly have preferred it if you had somehow gotten him to agree to negotiate something better than the situation we're currently in."

"I wouldn't quit just for lack of hope but I've been told I can't get therapy about how much other people need to change. Making him stop causing problems is my job, not yours, and I didn't intend to waste your time demanding that you somehow do that when your inability to do that was guaranteed by the people who extended us this invitation." Shrug. "I don't know how to play Spades."

"If it comes to that, I can teach you how to play."

"But first, let me check -- who sent you here? Who's paying? What are their motivations?"

"In descending order of confidence - they identified themselves as the Astral Therapy Agency; they might want to prevent a war; they might want Luka to be happy; they might be curious what will happen; we might be in the middle of a well-executed dictionary attack aimed at one or another of those ends. Their stated motivation was to offer us the opportunity to try to talk with each other without the strategic considerations that have prevented us from being frank with each other recently. If you'd like me to - speak from a perspective from which that would be a deeply emotionally appealing opportunity, I can do that."

"Oh, fascinating. The Agency reached out to you? I wonder if it's someone within the Agency, or if they merely facilitated for another payor."

"Anyway, it sounds like you're uncertain of their motivations, but you might be willing to admit to some of your own. How would it be deeply emotionally appealing to try to talk to each other?"